Black History is American History

I have wanted to visit the Smithsonian Museum of African American history since it first opened in 2015.  When my nephew and his girlfriend came East for a visit and wanted to see D.C., I seized on the opportunity and it was the very first thing I saw on my visit to the city.      

The museum has 7 floors —— 3 underground and 3 above ground, divided by an expansive lobby on the ground floor.  Though entrance is free, tickers are required because the museum is so popular with visitors.  There is something very heartening about this and as I waited in line I felt like I was surrounded by a host of fellow Americans who get it.  These days, that’s no small thing.        

The floors below the lobby depict the years from slavery’s arrival in North America to the election of Barack Obama and beyond.  Visitors descend three levels to begin and the space is dark this far below.  It took me a minute to realize that the walls are covered in a substance that looks like wood.  We are in the hull of a ship making the journey of the Middle Passage.        

There are some artifacts, though few relative to the fact that we are in a Smithsonian museum of history.  Most of what we view are the words of people - Oloudah Equiano especially - describing the reality of enslavement.  The displays are offered in a tone of matter-of-factness and it is in these descriptions and maps of the journey across the Atlantic and portrayals of the slave ships’ holds that the horror takes shape for museum visitors.

The visitor winds around, slowly ascending toward the 19th century.  There is a statue of Thomas Jefferson and his words in the Declaration of Independence, plus descriptions of the enslaved population at Monticello, including the stories of the Hemmings family.  The history is presented precisely in order for the visitor to draw her own conclusions about both Jefferson and the nation he helped found.  As I walk through the history, of the 1800s the abolition movement comes into view.  The words and actions of abolitionists like Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and William Lloyd Garrison take command of the narrative.  At every juncture, the experiences and lives of Black Americans are at the core of the story.        

Notably, there are few artifacts, a fact that underscores the reality of being enslaved and held as property.  People denied the power to own their very bodies leave few possessions to be cherished.  Those artifacts that are displayed - a lace handkerchief that belonged to Harriet Tubman; a copy of Frederick Douglass’ North Star newspaper - are more powerful because of the rarity.        

As I continue to walk the path upward, the historical record winds from the hopes of Reconstruction to the discouragement and terror of Jim Crow.  Military service by Black Americans, segregation, and the Great Migration sit alongside one another, telling the story of our nation.  Now there are more pictures and artifacts to show the story, including a powerful and emotional display of the story of Emmet Till’s trip to Mississippi. 

The museum tells the story of our collective past with space left open for us to make a better future, no small task in this nation.  It celebrates Black lives, community, and culture without shirking the harder truths lived by those lives.  The museum is a monument to our collective history.  For much of my walk through this story of the United States,  my emotions were at the surface, as they often are when I teach this history, which I take pains to keep alive.  I want everyone in this nation to visit the museum and to spend time wrestling with the truth of our collective past.  It is the only way to a better future for us all.

Loss and Hope

In the New York Times today there was an article about Covid (and it seems like every article is about Covid…..but that is a topic for another day), a chaplain at a hospital in California, speaking about the ways in which people are dying alone in the pandemic explained how she and her staff try to ease the loneliness and grief of families losing a loved one in the pandemic.  She explained how they look to find opportunities to make human connections in these moments.  One example really stood out to me.  She explained, “We Zoomed in a person’s son who was incarcerated, and she hadn’t seen him for years before she died.”

The description hit me like a sucker punch.  This seems so undeniably sad and such an indictment of our national character.  How can justice be served by punishing people who are incarcerated by denying them access to the people who love them?  How can we hope to build a strong community for all of us when we punish families in this way.  So much of the way we live has changed in the pandemic and I hope that when we get to the other side we work on treating people - all of us - better.  We need to re-think the ways in which we use prisons and jails in our justice system.  No one, no matter how terrible their crime, should be so isolated that they cannot see their family while they are incarnated.  There is nothing to be gained by such cruelty and so much of us that is lost because of it.

July 4

I love my country with a depth that has fostered a career spent teaching about its history and politics.  I am a patriot who named her only child after the man whose words we celebrate on this 4th of July day.  

But I am no “Love my country right or wrong” patriot.  I am an “I love my country enough to right the wrongs” patriot.  This year, a year determined to teach us some very important lessons, it seems appropriate to pause and think again abut the patriot I am.

I’ve taught it so much that I know the preamble to the Declaration of Independence by heart.  I read it several times a year; I think about it often.  I teach the Declaration in terms of that preamble and I never fail to be stirred by the claim that all men are created equal and endowed with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  I think of the power of such a claim when it was made in 1776 and as we try to live by it now.  I teach my students that every right Americans subsequently demanded to have recognized, be it the right to be free from slavery, to vote, to marry whomever we please, was recognized in those words and was there all along.  

That’s not all that I teach because I know how often we fell short of that stirring claim; I know how often we still fall short of it.  I teach my students about both of those truths.  I teach Frederick Douglass’s words about the 4th of July.  I teach them about the racism baked into our founding and built into our firmament.

Then I remind them that we must be patriots who seek a better nation for all of us.  I remind them that all we need do is return to the words of the Declaration and let that truth guide our way.  

Juneteenth

I vividly remember the history class where I first learned about Juneteenth.  I was an undergraduate at UCLA - so it was the late ‘80s - and there was a passing reference to June 19 Black community celebrations in Texas in a collection of essays about the end of slavery.  I read them for a post-Civil War/Reconstruction American history class and the reference caught my attention.

I recall thinking that I had never heard of it before; that the professor in the history class never mentioned it himself.  At the time, I was a Californian through and through and that Southern history seemed distant from the world in which I lived.

Within a few years, I had moved to Nashville and Southern and Civil War history was everywhere I looked.  The more I explored the locations of historical events; the more I read the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction, the more Juneteenth stood out in my mind, as both an idea and a celebration.  It stood out as a cultural reflection of the history I was thinking about and sought to understand and it also stood out for its absence in the world of mainstream American culture.

In the last few years, Juneteenth has attracted more attention.  This year, in the explosion of real and, it seems, enduring interest in taking on the challenges of repairing the years of systemic inequality that is modern America, Juneteenth is at the center of our current dialogue.  If we want to make real the pledge that Black lives matter, and I certainly do, it’s long overdue that we think about our national history in terms of what’s been neglected, marginalized, or just plain left out.

For my Civics and Citizenship 8th grade class, summer reading will include a reflection on Juneteenth (this one, by Annette Garden Reed, which is both personal and historically rich), and some more readings around the idea of what history gets monuments, what gets ignored, and what that difference tells us about our national identity.

At minimum, my 8th graders will know and understand Juneteenth well before the age when I first knew of it.  At maximum, well, when you know that truth of your nations’s history, then you know the challenges that lie before you.  You learn what kind of citizen you would like to become.  That’s why 8th graders need to know our history.  And knowing about Juneteenth seems like a very good place to start.

Separation

Time is flying past and I am just a few days from being the parent of a high school graduate who is excited to run off to college and start a new adventure.  My heart is full and I am proud of him.  I am systematically preparing for a separation that we planned and desire but one that I still expect will feel like tearing a bandaid off a wound.

Then I turn on NPR or read the New York Times and see stories of my government deliberately separating children from their mothers at the borders of our country.  Here I am barely able to think about giving my 18 year old a last hug and leaving him with a supply of everything he could possibly need (you should see the lip balm and Cliff bar collection he’s already acquired, not to mention soft sheets and pillows for his bed) when I leave him at college and meanwhile my government is deliberately and cheerfully yanking small children from the arms of their mothers then jailing them both in separate places to deliberately inflict misery.

It is unthinkably wrong and it is being done in the name of out nation.  We are all complicit.  The ACLU is organizing a petition and doing their best.  Send them your support and tell your elected officials that we won’t stand for this policy.   Then call ICE and demand to know where the children are: 866-347-2423.

August 14 in My America

It’s Monday, the day I usually post a few pictures of my garden and reflect upon the growing season to date.  But today, a garden post can wait in favor of a more serious discussion about race in America.  I have been teaching U.S. history for more than 20 years, so it’s fair to say I have spent a good deal of time thinking about racism in this nation.  It’s part of the very fabric of our founding and cannot be ignored if you wish to understand who were were in 1607, let alone 2017.

As any historian can tell you, this nation has made progress on inclusion and equality, but not so much progress that racism is gone.  Our progress is well short of perfection.  We may have elected an African-American president in 2008, but we’re not in post-racial America.  There can be no such animal in a country founded upon the original sin of slavery.   Which is not to say that we can’t get better, that we can’t work to fulfill Martin Luther King’s dream.  We can and we must.  But neither can we pretend that more than 250 years of legal slavery founded upon racist principles can be wiped out in a century and half.  Some problems take longer to correct than they took to create.  And this is one hell of a problem.

Since the events in Charlottesville over the weekend, I’ve seen plenty of people of color reject the sentiment of well-meaning whites who saw the weekend’s white supremacist rally and claim, “This isn’t America.”  In fact, this is very much America.  We are a place that incarcerates blacks at a greater rate than whites.  We are a place that memorializes Confederate history as if it is a benign story of disagreements instead of an ugly tale of gross racial inequality and injustice.  The North may have won the Civil War but the South won Reconstruction.  We can’t even acknowledge that fact.  We are a place where opportunities are not equally available.  We are a nation founded in slavery, often unwilling to own up to all that implies about the truth of our origins.

That is our America.  

But it needn’t continue to be our America.  It’s not mine; not the country I want for my fellow Americans; not the country I think we can be.  Martin Luther King told us that the arc of history is long but that it always bends toward justice.  I would add that the bend toward justice happens more rapidly when we push it in that direction.  That means speaking out, especially when it is uncomfortable to do so. That means acknowledging the ways in which privileges for some of us has meant exclusion for others.  That means demanding that we live up to the promises of equality and justice in our founding documents.  We didn’t do it at our founding.  We don’t do it now. 

But this is our America and we can be better than we are.  In point of fact, we must be better.  We must make this the nation we want it to be; an America for everyone.

And Justice for All?

I've been a long-standing opponent of the death penalty and for most of my  life that's been an uphill battle.   Though American support for the death penalty has declined in the last ten years, something like 70% of the American public still supports its use.  We're a nation who likes our executions.

By happenstance, application of the death penalty has been in the news for the last few weeks, just as I've begun teaching American Government to a new crop of Seniors.  I don't seek to convert students to my point of view - that would be unethical - but I do introduce them to politics from a political scientist's point of view.  Right now, we are studying the Constitution.  The death penalty is a question of constitutionality on a number of fronts.  The Constitution prevents cruel and unusual punishment.  The Supreme Court has found that execution is neither cruel nor unusual.  The Constitution also requires due process and justice under the law.  In my mind, those were the fundamental issues on the table in the state of Georgia's bid to execute Troy Davis.

Twenty-two years ago, Troy Davis was accused of the shooting off an off-duty police officer, Mark MacPhail.  The crime happened in Savannah, Georgia, and there's no question that Davis was in the parking lot where MacPhail's murder occurred.  The police never recovered the gun; there was never any physical evidence connecting Davis to the crime.  In the original police investigation a number of eyewitnesses identified Davis as the shooter.  A jury found Davis guilty of the crime and the judge sentenced him to death.  In subsequent years, nearly all of the eyewitnesses recanted their testimony against Davis, telling the courts that police investigators at the time had pressured them to identify Davis as the shooter.  Davis steadfastly maintained his innocence at trial and while in prison.  The police never found any physical evidence to connect Davis to the crime. 

For years, I've followed Troy Davis's case.  He'd dodged execution dates before, though rarely with any hope that another execution date would be avoided.  Yesterday, as another execution hour loomed, Davis's supporters and lawyers tried in vain to stop his execution.  My students and I listened to a news story about the situation and we talked about the issues of justice and Constitutionality at play.  When they left class yesterday, I encouraged them to pay attention to events in Georgia.  My classes have both death penalty supporters and opponents.  Both were sobered by the case.

I don't know if Troy Davis was guilty in the shooting of Mark MacPhail.  I know that there was no physical evidence to connect him to the crime.  I know that eyewitness testimony is notoriously suspect.  I know that our criminal justice system makes mistakes and that people serve time for crimes they didn't commit.  I know that the police are not always trust-worthy, especially when the rights of poor black men are at stake.  And I know that the state should not be executing people - taking their lives - unless we are damned sure that they are guilty. 

I know that Davis's execution won't be the last injustice in this nation.  I know that The Innocence Project and others are hard at work trying to correct those injustices.  I know that change can only happen when citizens like me stand up for the principles they believe in.  I know my nation is imperfect, but I believe in the promises of the Constitution.  I believe in the power of liberty and justice for all.  I will teach my students that this is true.  But they will also know about injustice; about Troy Davis and the state of Georgia.  In my darker moments, I wonder which message will resound most loudly.

Putting My Money Where My Mouth Is

I can't claim credit for turning up this Esquire article about Ray Towler, a who man who spent 29 years in jail for  crime he didn't commit.  The story came to me courtesy of the terrific Kottke.  But I will say that the tale lingers.  And I find myself thinking that if this sort of thing happened to white America as often as it happens to black America, the problem would have been fixed by now.

Mr. Towler eventually got help from The Innocence Project.  The organization does amazing work and they deserve our support.  I've never done this before, but I think that it's important to support their effort to make sure that our justice system is actually just.  The Innocence Project is trying to raise $20,000 in support of their work.  They plan to do it via fund-raising pages.  Mine is here and, if you're so inclined, I hope that you'll donate and help this project.  All funds raised go to The Innocence Project, to support their work to free innocent men and women from our nation's prisons.  It's noble work in pursuit of justice, which is shamefully elusive for some of us.  I hope you can help.